ABSTRACT
In this final chapter, instead of taking official discourse as our starting-point for thinking about the ‘problem’ of student writing in higher education, as I did in Chapter 1, I want to focus on understandings generated from recent work in academic literacies in the UK, including the research project on which this book is based. I will draw on these understandings in order to consider a framework which is more comprehensive in its description of different approaches to student writing and student writing pedagogy than that available in official discourse on communication. As such, this framework can serve as a heuristic, enabling us to consider how we wish to approach the teaching of student academic writing in the future. In many ways, now is a good time for re-thinking institutional and pedagogical practices in HE in the UK; for, whilst the principal argument in this book is that the official discourse on language and communication is, at best, ill conceived, the recent, officially sanctioned, interest in learning and teaching means that there is (some) space for re-imagining pedagogic theories and practices.1
